When the New Testament talks about priests it does not mean vicars. The New Testament uses others words for ministry and broadly these are words that talk about oversight and service. Priesthood is reserved for something else and this crops up in three ways. All of them find an airing in the letter to the Hebrews, from which our first reading was taken.

The first way it talks about priests is found when it makes reference to the Old Testament style of sacrifices. The priest is the one who kills the beast as an offering to God and as we heard in our first reading (Hebrews 10:11-14) this is something that has to be repeated time and time again because its effect wears off; ultimately it makes no difference to our relationship with God.

The first Christians when they reflected on what had happened in Jesus dying on the cross borrowed imagery from this Temple sacrificial system. In dying Jesus was seen to be, in the language of this system, ‘the perfect offering’, so perfect that after he has died the system is broken, smashed apart. It was nothing short of God reaching down and showing that animal sacrifices are irrelevant and only serve to lock us into a system that holds us in chains. It is a system that binds us by the necessity to repeat the sacrifice time and time again. We never move beyond it; we are unable to move beyond it by our sacrificial actions.

What Jesus shows us is that only God can break this cycle of repeat sacrifices, because there is nothing we can do to win God’s favour by our own efforts. God’s favour is a free gift that comes because God chooses to give it out of love, the love of the creator, and nothing else can have any effect at all. Jesus is thus seen as the great high priest, the one whose sacrifice breaks all sacrifices and consigns them to the bin. That is the second way the New Testament talks about priests and our first reading went on to refer to this. Christ is both the one offered on the cross and the one who does the offering. So he can be described in some passages as the lamb of God, the sacrificial offering - God offering himself, and in others in priestly terms as the one doing the offering - again because it is God who is offering himself, by his gracious love he breaks apart a system that would bind us.

The third way the New Testament talks about priests is the priesthood of all believers. This borrows the imagery from the temple to say that in God’s gracious mercy we are set free from having to rely on others to mediate on our behalf. We have our own direct line to the heart of God and it comes through Christ. So we share in his priesthood because he lets us. So we don’t intercede through saints, through Mary and certainly not through clergy. We can pray direct to God because God has smashed apart the notion that we have to go through someone else.

Our first reading didn’t use the word priest in this context but it did talk about those who are sanctified being perfected by this offering of Christ, by his priestly activity (v14). Being sanctified is a much more radical notion than we might at first imagine. It does not leave us as we are, but causes a radical transformation in what it means to be human. The Christian Gospel is not simply fitted into the world as it is, leaving us untouched, but changes us and therefore changes the way we see the world.

There is an ancient phrase that ‘God became human so that humanity might become God’. The Christian Gospel is not just that God came on a day trip to planet earth and then left again, as some kind of visitor, but that in coming he has taken us up to where he is in the divine splendour. Through him, through his destruction of the sacrificial system in his grace, we participate in the life that is God; we share in the life of God. The distance is removed and the symbol of that distance and of separation, the Temple Curtain, in Matthew’s Gospel is torn in two at the moment of Jesus’ death.

So we are sanctified, we are made holy, and in the process God stamps his ownership on the world. It is not our world, it is God’s world and we belong to God. The shorthand way of referring to this is to talk about the Kingdom.

The passage continued with a bidding at the end not to neglect to meet together, but to encourage one another (v25). There is no individual soul in isolation here. We belong together and so what it means to be holy is not about remaining separate from everyone else, but fundamentally tied up with being involved in our common life. The Gospel of the Kingdom is a social gospel, because the God at the heart of it gets involved in our human mess. But it is not left messy; it is lifted up and taken into the divine glory.

We celebrate this Gospel of the kingdom in a meal which we share together - the Communion or Eucharist. I came across an interesting way of looking at the word ‘companion’ recently that has something illuminating to say to this. If we split up the word ‘companion’ into its etymological roots of ‘com’ (for communion, eating together) and ‘panis’ (bread) we get an interesting notion that through eating together the same bread we are transformed into companions of the kingdom: ‘com’ ‘panis’. By celebrating the Communion we proclaim a radically different understanding of what it is to be fully human before God to that which is around us.

This is not a faith that will bolster trends in virtual communities, where we design our concepts of community according to the networks we set up. So our eating of the common bread is linked through the Kingdom with the inmates sharing communion in a prison chapel, with those on other sides of the world who have barely enough to eat or even less, with those who we would like to forget about because they are not like us - whatever that might mean.

Being priests of God, having the Temple sacrificial system smashed, breaks barriers in all directions. It breaks them between us and God because God chooses it to be that way. But it also breaks the barriers between different people because all share in the same kingdom and all are invited to share in the same celebration meal of that kingdom. That gives us a hope that we can hold fast to for none are excluded; all are drawn into the life of God; all are sanctified in the love of God in Christ our true priest.

© Ian Black 2003

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